Welcome to the FoundationDB Record Layer community, and thank you for contributing! The following guide outlines the basics of how to get involved.
We want the FoundationDB Record Layer community to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible, and have adopted a Code of Conduct that we ask all community members to read and observe.
By submitting a pull request, you represent that you have the right to license your contribution to Apple and the community, and agree by submitting the patch that your contributions are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.
At project launch, FoundationDB has a light governance structure. The intention is for the community to evolve quickly and adopt additional processes as participation grows. Stay tuned, and stay engaged! Your feedback is welcome.
We draw inspiration from the Apache Software Foundation's informal motto: "community over code", and their emphasis on meritocratic rules. You'll also observe that some initial community structure is inspired by the Swift community.
Members of the Apple FoundationDB team are part of the initial core committers helping review individual contributions; you'll see them commenting on your pull requests. Future committers to the open source project, and the process for adding individuals in this role will be formalized in the future.
We happily welcome your contributions! Before diving in, please read the following contribution guidelines.
All contributions to the FoundationDB Record Layer should begin life as a GitHub issue, describing the nature of the issue or enhancement that you wish to address. For larger changes, the issue system can also act as an area of tracking the feature's design and any sub-issues that need to be implemented as part of your change.
It is always acceptable and encouraged, of course, to discuss enhancements and issues in the FoundationDB forums, even prior to opening an issue. But the opening of a GitHub issue effectively notifies the community of your work (or intent to work). And, more importantly, by letting the community know that you intend to get involved before you begin any significant development effort avoids multiple people solving the same problem, or wasted work in developing a solution that may not align with the design or goals of the project. Finally, and most importantly, it keeps the community open and communicative.
When opening a pull request (PR), please ensure that the title of the pull request or the commit message indicates the issue that it is addressing (see Closing issues with keywords). For example:
Fixes #492: Remove excessive frobnification in online index rebuild
This will automatically create an association between the PR and the issue that it is addressing and, upon merging of the PR into the main code line, will automatically mark the issue as resolved.
If your pull request results in a user-visible change to the Record Layer, you should also update the release notes. For most changes, it is sufficient to fill in one of the bullets in the "next release" section of that document. You should include a short description of the change as well as filling in the issue number. The "next release" section is commented out, so the change won't be visible in our documentation until the next time a release is cut.
Please refer to the section below on using GitHub issues and the community forums for more info.
To report a security issue, please DO NOT start by filing a public issue or posting to the forums; instead send a private email to fdb-oss-security@group.apple.com.
We encourage your participation asking questions and helping improve the FoundationDB Record Layer project. Check out the FoundationDB community forums. These forums are shared with the FoundationDB project, and serve a similar function as mailing lists in many open source projects. The forums are organized into three sections:
- FoundationDB Layer Development FoundationDB forum for discussing layer development.
- FoundationDB Development: Used to discuss more general FDB development.
- Using FoundationDB: For discussing user-facing topics. Getting started and have a question? This is the place for you.
- Site Feedback: A category for discussing the forums and the OSS project, its organization, how it works, and how we can improve it.
GitHub issues and the community forums both offer features to facilitate discussion. To clarify how and when to use each tool, here's a quick summary of how we think about them:
GitHub Issues should be used for tracking tasks. If you know the specific code that needs to be changed, then it should go to GitHub Issues. Everything else should go to the Forums. For example:
- I am experiencing some weird behavior, which I think is a bug, but I don't know where exactly (mysteries and unexpected behaviors): Forums
- I see a bug in this piece of code: GitHub Issues
- Feature requests and design discussion: Forums (output of final design should be included with the resulting GitHub issue)
- Implementing an agreed upon feature: GitHub Issues
In particular, proposed major additions to the project should be discussed in the forums rather than opening an issue immediately followed by a pull request.
Stay connected to the project and the community! For project and community updates, follow the FoundationDB project blog. Development announcements will be made via the community forums' dev-announce section.